Industry, Environment, Taiwan (KP31)

Ask anyone in the world about Taiwan, and you will probably hear about its economic miracle—becoming a developed nation with electronics manufacturing and petrochemical processing. However, recently more people in Taiwan are asking themselves, does it make sense for a small subtropical island to focus on heavy industry, which takes a toll on the labor force, the health of residents, and the limited natural environment?

To give us some thoughts on this question is Professor Wenling Tu from Taiwan’s National Chengchi University, who is a founding member of several environmental NGOs and is a professor of public administration, and Ms. Hsin-I Lin, a researcher with Citizens of the Earth Taiwan, a foundation working on issues specific to the environment, including industrial pollution and waste.

We speak about Kaohsiung’s petrochemical pipe explosion from last year, how Taiwan’s development has been skewed towards unregulated industrialization, and what are the most hopeful and worrying trends for the next five to ten years.

Ketagalan Media (KM): We thank Professor Tu Wen-ling and Ms. Lin Hsin-yi for talking with us about the environmental impact of Taiwan’s largest industries. First, I want to know how did the two of you step into this field?

Prof. Tu Wen-ling (Tu): I became involved around college, in the 90s. Of course when I was younger, I saw the prettier side of Taiwan, but by the 90s there were a lot of environmental movements that sprung up, like the anti-nuclear, forestry, or anti-light metals movements. After I went to the United States, I felt very strongly that the environment will be a big challenge for Taiwan going forward, so I studied environmental policy. Also I realized that Taiwan was not part of the international conversation on the environment. Taiwan was shut out of formal diplomacy, like the United Nations, since the 70s; that was also when the world paid more attention to the environment and started discussing relevant policies.

I wanted to do something about that, so we first founded a Taiwanese students’ group called Environmental Task Force, and then the Taiwan Environmental Action Network (TEAN), to work on NGO diplomacy and share Taiwan’s environmental experience with the world. That was more than twenty years ago!

Lin Hsin-I (Lin): I am really a newbie in this field. I just joined Citizens for the Earth Taiwan (CET) about half a year ago. Originally I was a forestry major, and as a student of science we learned to use statistics and data, but I realized it’s really the people who decide how things go. So to solve our problems, I believe that people are the key, and so I switched to sociology. Sociology taught me to be critical, to think about problems with systems that we take for granted. It gave me a new perspective on the world.

Tu: Hsin-I mentioned CET, and TEAN actually merged with them back in 2011. When TEAN first started working with NGOs in Taiwan and trying to connect them to the world, they all supported the idea but thought language was an issue. So we wanted to form an NGO that uses a second language, to put together. At the end, we were able to get young people in America, the UK, and even France to care about Taiwan’s environmental issues.

KM: Taiwan’s leading industries are basically electronics manufacturing, and petrochemicals. After the documentary “Beyond Beauty” and also the Kaohsiung gas explosion incident last year, a lot of people all of a sudden realized how bad the problem is. How did we get to here today?

Tu: “Beyond Beauty” really only showed the tip of the iceberg. The issues in the movie have been the focus of NGOs and community groups for a very long time, like the Houjin River and Dalinpu in Kaohsiung, but the movie really brought mass attention to it. The problem was of course a long time in the making—it’s the result of land use policies that only emphasized economic growth at the expense of preservation. It’s the classic Taiwanese thinking of grabbing short-term gains, making a quick return. Fortunately, Taiwan also has residents and volunteers who fight for these issues, so once the public realize the problem we can point to distortions within government policies.

Although Taiwan is now part of APEC, but we are not connected to global trends in social justice issues. Taiwan’s development is still very skewed towards using economic growth to attract international attention. But Taiwan is an island; we have limited resources. We need to have very good long term planning. So far, we have only been killing the hen for the egg, so to speak. Electronics and petrochemicals are our largest industries, contributing to our GDP, providing jobs, and putting Taiwan in the international supply chain. But our petrochemical industry is really made up of a handful of state or privately owned enterprises with sizable government subsidies, with no regard for any long term strategy or the health of our people. Therefore, we see areas with heavy industry in Central and Southern Taiwan are also heavily polluted. Electronics manufacturing is a newer industry, and it has been a challenge to understand or regulate it, since the industry changes so quickly.

KM: But wouldn’t Taiwan need petrochemical or electronics industry for economic survival? We interviewed Dr. Chen Hsin-yu (who ran for Kaohsiung City Council for the Flanc Radical), and he said we could replace the petrochemical industry with handcraft and woodworking. Would something like that really contribute the same kind of economic value or job opportunity as petrochemicals? Or is there really a substitute? Or how do we begin to regulate it?

Lin: For petrochemicals, I think there are two things we can work on to regulate. First is to regulate the import of raw chemical materials. The government should know who is importing what chemicals, how they are used, what the toxicities are. Taiwan is a fast changing market, and the manufacturers themselves might not know how these chemicals work. Right now we do have a Toxic Chemical Material Regulations Law, but there are still ways we can improve it.

Second, the residents, communities and citizens need to have access to transparent information; simply, its the right to know. We the people need to know what risks we are exposed to. How the industry will change depends on what the people know. In the past, we think the “scientific experts” have all the answers, but that is because only they had access to information. We want to spread the knowledge, and bring more wisdom from the people to find solutions together. Any decision on substitutes or changes to our industrial landscape should be worked out with the people’s input.

KM: In other words, we need to let more people know, so more people can think of solutions together?

Lin: As for a substitute industry, we are used to thinking each city has to have one big industry, but that’s not necessarily true.

Tu: To add to the question about substitute industries, for a resource-strapped island like Taiwan, developing industries that use large amounts of electricity and water probably isn’t a good idea. It’s important for the people to know and decide for ourselves. The Sixth Naptha Cracker plant, in Yunlin, was originally planned for Yilan County. But the governor at the time Chen Ting-nan rejected the proposal, based on the comprehensive planning for Yilan at the time, which said Yilan’s geography was not suitable for petrochemical plants. Compare that with Yunlin, which produces 60% of Taiwan’s rice, chicken, and vegetables. Does putting a petrochemical plant there improve or limit its development?

In Kaohsiung as well, the state of the environment will limit industrial growth eventually. Our petrochemical industry is concentrated on the lower-profit part of the supply chain, and 80% of our products are shipped to China for higher-value processing. Taiwan isn’t even an oil-producing country. So who is getting the benefits? Who is bearing the costs? We should think clearly about this. As for electronics, we are not opposed to it, but why not invest in improving its impact on our health and the environment? The Taiwanese are smart, we can become a leader in this area, a knowledge exporter. We should have that kind of confidence.

KM: So to use the government’s power to set limitations on the industry, to redirect resources to other directions? Since if the industry is left to its own devices, they won’t have an incentive to improve?

Tu: Not only do we leave them to themselves, we roll back regulation, and subsidize their tax bills and water bills. We sell them precious, limited resources on a discount. This kind of policy causes our development to be skewed.

Lin: And speaking of agriculture, Taiwan’s agriculture technology has actually always been at the world’s forefront, but our policies constantly ignore our farmers. Why don’t we keep supporting something we are already good at? It’s a shame to eliminate that part of our economy.

KM: Finally, what would you say is the best and the worst trends for the next five to ten years?

Tu: Taiwan has very unique geographical resources. 70% of our area is mountains, with over 200 mountains above 3,000 meters (about 9,800 feet). Overall, there are still much we can preserve. For example, the biodiversity, the DNA databank, within our mountains. We should value our natural gift, and really re-imagine what development should mean to us.

The worst trend would be unrestricted development. We have nuclear power, but we don’t think about the long term consequences of where to store nuclear waste. Given climate change, would nuclear power become an all-encompassing disaster for us? We need to include all those risks in our energy strategy.

Our job is to use our resources smartly, focus on what we’re good at. We are hardworking, but we don’t work smart, so we are all working overtime to burn our resources. But if we can combine our ability to think on our feet, with the right use of our resources and our cosmopolitan culture, I believe we can come up with something more sustainable. The election this past November reflected some of this sentiment I believe.

Lin: I don’t think anyone can say for the next five to ten years what will happen, but I believe our generation of young people will be very busy. We are faced with encroaching economic influence from China. Our labor conditions, being overworked, will push us to the limit.

KM: Even if we are busy, but wouldn’t it also be a big accomplishment, if we can resolve these issues?

Lin: I agree! The first thing though I think is to “re-understand” Taiwan. Here’s a personal story—I went to Dalinpu in Kaohsiung once. Dalinpu is the area where people say we should build a petrochemical zone, after the gas explosion. It’s already a heavy industrial area, and the residents suffer through very serious industrial pollution. They have only a small patch of beach for their use, and the elders have to take sleeping pills to sleep at night. That’s why the younger people are out protesting.

I sat in at a meeting where environmental engineering students were talking to the residents as part of their class on doing environmental assessments. Interestingly, when the residents talked about their memories and histories, the students ignored them. All the students wanted to ask was “tell us what you want to do instead of petrochemicals.” They were talking past each other.

It was a strange feeling, that our generation of technicians and engineers are separated from the actual land. The see the experience of living on the land, and the relationships between people, as far less important as the answers they can calculate from data. This is the ultimate in rational capitalism, and I think it’s very scary. That’s how I was taught as a science major. I think we have more important problems than GDP growth. If we want to know which direction we should go, then I think we should we get to re-understand Taiwan again.

KM: Thanks so much to Prof. Tu and Hsin-yi for your time and thoughts.

History and culture are the frames that prescribe how we understand the world around us. Our co-hosts present in-depth interviews on how art, culture, history and politics intertwine throughout time and space to connect us. Find out about the cosmopolitan modern Taipei downtown in the 1920s, regional trade, the future of aboriginal culture and more.

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Greg Hao

Nice to see you guys back at it. But I think you might need to fix the podcast’s RSS feed as the last update through iTunes (or my other podcast app) all show the most recent episode as the Nov. 25, 2014 Debrief. Cheers!